This weekend, Former Wall St. Analyst Henry Blodget reports Yahoo has a hit list of 1,500 to 2,500 employees targeted for layoffs by division heads, at the behest of Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s co-founder and CEO.

Search guru John Battelle has long advocated the type of search spinout advocated by the WSJ this weekend, as shown by his prescient May 2007 post. (No surprise to Search Engine Watch readers.)

Our sources indicate the only safe place at Yahoo right now: Right Media.

No doubt a leaner and meaner — or kinder and gentler — Yahoo will emerge before Jerry Yang’s January 29 analyst conference call when all shall be revealed to Wall Street and the search world.

Potential alliances between search engines — Yahoo and MSN? Google and Yahoo? MSN and Ask? — will continue to play out in ’08.

This week, both LinkedIn and Facebook are beefing up their paid social offerings in different ways, while Google seeks to cut off Adwords revenues for fake news sites. And might Google be favouring desktop over its own AMP in its upcoming mobile-first index?

Here we’ll take a look at the basic things you need to know in regards to search engine optimisation, a discipline that everyone in your organisation should at least be aware of, if not have a decent technical understanding.